1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to presenting database information. More particularly, the present invention relates to the automatic creation of an output file including at least one image and identifying information therefor obtained from a database.
2. Background Information
Databases contain many different types of information, including information related to digital or digitized images. Databases can contain images and/or pointers to images that are stored externally to the database, and/or information about the images. A wide variety of industries utilize databases related to images. For example, retailers, manufacturers, brokers, ad agencies and other companies use images of products and services that are offered for sale in advertisements. Many companies have found it useful to analyze advertising images, typically in digital or digitized form (making it possible to include them or pointers to them in a database), to gain insight into how different approaches affect sales of a given product (or service) or group of products, to understand how the volume and type of advertising for one brand or product compares to that of other brands and products, to verify that advertisements have been presented for review by consumers so that payments that are contingent on such advertising placements can be made, to review trademark usage by various advertisers, and for many other purposes.
Typically, advertising image databases contain or reference digital representations of advertising images, along with varying degrees of information about the advertising images. As with many databases, queries can be run against the data to retrieve specific information which contains references to the images or retrieve the images themselves. While it can be helpful to review the results of such queries on-line, there is also a significant need for offline review and/or sharing of query results or portions thereof. This is typically accomplished by a user copying individual images from the database to a local workstation or personal computer where the image can then be manipulated locally. This manipulation frequently takes the form of a user inserting the image into a word processing program or a presentation program, such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe Acrobat, resizing the image to fit properly within the allocated space, and manually inserting identifying information related to the image so that others who subsequently view the image can understand the source and relevance of the image. When multiple images are inserted in such programs, additional time must be devoted to creating a template to organize the way the images and related identifying information are presented. This is a very time consuming and inefficient process, which significantly reduces the extent to which images retrieved from databases are used in word processing and presentation programs.
Thus, a need exists for a flexible and efficient method of creating documents, and other ways of presenting information, that enable people to view images and identifying information related thereto that have been retrieved from a database, offline from the database.